Slashdot Mirror
The Top 10 Gaming Colleges
Pluvius writes "The top-ten list of party schools published by the Princeton Review every year has always been a popular metric among prospective American college students for determining the 'most compatible' university to attend. Because of this, the Global Gaming League has come up with a more geek-oriented list: The First Annual Top Gaming Colleges Survey. The entries were selected based on such factors as proximity to gamer meccas such as Southern California, the frequency of LAN parties, and the existence and strength of a game design curriculum. Here's an excerpt from the number one entry, UT/Austin: 'Last, if you don't feel like leaving your dorm, there's nothing to worry about. A blistering Internet connection will give you LAN pings inside Texas, 30 milliseconds of latency to the East coast and 40 to the West coast. "The Internet connection at the dorms is ****ing amazing. I was [on it] freshman year; I miss that part about moving out of the dorms."'"
Try this: http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=3900
So this is a reason I shouldn't go to UVA? Because I "won't have time to game?" What a trite article. Maybe you should go to a university because it will give you a competitive education, not because you can ping 9ms to your favorite server?
Execute? [Y/N] _
It is already a top 10 party school and has a great football team and about 50,000 students. Since all the non-techies can just get drunk, the techies can start their anti-scial isolation training right in college by never leaving their dorn rooms. Wonder if they offer a degree in slashdotting?
[CROCHETY_OLD_MAN]
Why, sonny, I remember back in my days when deciding on a college was a balance between how much it cost and how good the college was for the field of study you wanted. You went to college with a priority on learning. We didn't have none of these newfangled college decision making thingys that were all about partying and maybe getting a token diploma after spending four years and thousands of dollars, dagnabbit!
What's that? You're joining Delta Tau Chi? Well, that makes a bit more sense.
[/CROCHETY_OLD_MAN]
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I can see really intelligent parents getting a hold of this list and starting to shift kids away from campuses where gaming is a little too friendly. Don't give them information they don't need to see!
Though, I'd rather have my kid at a school where gaming was damn easy, as opposed to a school where drinking was the only thing to do every day.
When I was in college, we had a very nice tub... pipe to the Internet :) Back in 98-99 I believe we leased part of a T3.
What stunk is we were blocked from playing games on the Internet. This was back during Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, Quake III, days. They blocked ports, UDP, you name it. It really stunk.
The LAN Gaming was great, particularly since you often knew the person you were playing against so I didn't mind THAT much. However, after I moved offcampus my senior year I found out that they took things a step further. They started blocking traffic between each dorm, meaning you could only play against people in your own dorm. When I asked what their reasons were, my friends just shrugged.
I don't know what the state of affairs is there now, for all I know they've opened up Internet gaming again. But it was a shame that a school ranked so highly for "being wired" that they took such steps. I know, I know... I wasn't going there to play games. But I did pretty well in school (later got my Masters) so it's not like I was a complete slacker.
To the best of my knowledge, the pipe for UT-Austin is a couple of 'commodity-Internet' OC3s leased from a lone carrier (Qwest). Using the 95th percentile on UTNet's 'busy days', inbound traffic hits around ~350 Mbps. Another thing to note is that the Internet2 uplink for UT-Austin is a Qwest OC12 (either it is or will be a GigE connection to I2 in the near future). Commodity-Internet is somewhat saturated, but decent. The big win is the I2 uplink being blazing (fast and fairly not saturated).
One of the things I experienced as a student in the dorms at UT-Austin (2000-2001) was the leveraging of a throughput quota on ResNet ports. I believe they alotted activated-for-pay ports six gigs of throughput in a given calendar week. Today, things have changed slightly:
So thats a big negative for all the 18-year old network gobblers out there who play GAMEZ and swap FILEZ.
So we are National Champions _and_ Gaming Gods? Sweet. ;)
I realize that NBCC-Miramichi might be a little on the obscure side, since it's both quite small and located in Atlantic Canada, but I understand that their Electronic Game Design was one of the very first gaming-specific programs offered anywhere, and was a little disappointed to see no mention of it at all in the article. It's short (two year) and very focused, with a high dropout rate (~50%), but for those willing to seriously dedicate themselves (which is a requirement for getting into the game industry anyway!), it is a very rewarding experience. Graduates of the program have been scooped up right after graduation (sometimes even before) by some fairly well-known companies, and others have gone on to create their own successful (if small) development studios. As a graduate who has gone on to a have a fairly successful career in the gaming industry, I can definately recommend the program, especially considering that it's also quite affordable as far as education goes.
I game, therefore I am...